Dereverberation

Abstract

Room reverberation is one of the two major causes (the other is background noise) of speech degradation and there has been an increasing need for speech dereverberation in various speech processing and communication applications. Although it has been studied for decades, speech dereverberation remains a challenging problem from both a theoretical and practical perspective. This chapter provides a methodical overview of speech dereverberation algorithms. They are classified into three categories: source model-based speech enhancement algorithms for dereverberation, separation of speech and reverberation via homomorphic transformation, and speech dereverberation by channel inversion and equalization. We outline the basic ideas behind these approaches, explain the assumptions they make, and discuss their characteristics as well as performance.